The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde: Why It Happened and What We Can Do About It

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE (AMERICAN) AVANT-GARDE Why It Happened and What We Can Do About It Richard Schechner In the American theatre what a burst of experimental energy there was from the '50s to around 1975. Not only directors, but authors, performers, composers , visual artists, designers, technicians, managers; and working In such a profusion of forms, spaces, social contexts; for so many different reasons: from "pure art" to anarchistic politics, from personal, even Intimate , expression and revelation to collective statements and archetypal imageary, from fierce assertions of what Ralph Ortiz called "paleologic," to uses of theatre and dance in psychological and physical therapy. In rooms, in theatres, in the streets, in the fields, in workplaces (factories, storefronts), In hospitals, prisons, in gathering-places (railroad stations, laundromats), in galleries, In schools-theatre, live performance, literally was everywhere trying to do everything. And working with so many different kinds of people: professional artists, students, people from "the community ," migrant farmers and laborers, poor people, people of all races and ethnic groups, economic classes. 48 A theatre engaged in different struggles: political, social, aesthetic, environmental : against the War In Vietnam, for racial equality and opportunity , against environmental degredation, for nuclear disarmament, against the military-industrial corporate multinational state, for women's rights, gay rights. A theatre that was genuinely intercultural, drawing its.techniques and examples from within the EuroAmerican culture area, and from without-from Asia, Africa, Native America, Micronesia: everywhere. Amidst this boiling activity deep questions of aesthetics were probed as they hadn't been before. Amidst? Because. What is a theatre? Where does It take place? Is that place "sacred" or special? Who performs there? Why? Is this person different or special? Where is the center of theatrical activity ? Does the text (still) have primacy? Do theatre artists "serve" the playwright and "interpret" his text? And if the text is not the most important thing, what is? Does It change from performance to perfor- mance? Should a theatrical event-no longer a play, a performance, a drama: but an "event"-procede in a linear way, and If not, what gives it unity? Does it need unity? What is unity? Is it different understood as Aristotle understood it, or Brecht, or Artaud, or the author of the Natyasastra? How should the audience get Involved in the event: as watchers, doers, witnesses, total participants (as in Grotowski's work since 1967)? How should performers be trained? And once trained, in what ways can they express themselves? Must performers always wear the mask of characters-a mask sculpted by authors who literally put words in the mouths of actors; and then those words, and the actor's very gestures, are re-formed by a director who in composing the mise-en-scene lays one more mask over the actor's body? First the author's and later the director's authority were laid aside. And for a few years-working sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in competition, sometimes in ignorance of each other-performers, directors, composers (not only in the musical sense), authors, designers: each functioned as "primary creators"-originators of theatrical events. There was such wiid, fecund intercourse among theatre people, visual artists , musicians, dancers, social activists, theorists that we believed we could renew the world. Alphonso Ortiz, in describing the work of Tewa ritual clowns, shows how the clowns move their hands showing and telling the clouds to form, the lightning to strike, the rain to fall, so that crops may grow. But then much, if not all, this activity-the experiments, the breaking of boundaries and conventions, the political action, the questioning, the multiplicity of staging options, the sharing of primary creativity-subsided. Many activites went forward- but the sense of movement, of general, collective action, was gone. A big bang was succeeded by entropy. It's my purpose here to investigate the entropy: to look it straight in its foggy face. And, frankly, to pick up seeds in the dust. First, let no one be surprised that a creative period in the theatre has been brief. In Western theatre, at least, that's the tradition. From the first play of Aeschylus to the last plays of Euripides and...